NEW YORK — The person Manti Te’o said was pretending to be his online girlfriend told the Notre Dame linebacker “I love you” in voicemails that were played during Teo’s interview with Katie Couric.

Taped earlier this week and broadcast yesterday, the hour-long talk show featured three voicemails that Te’o said were left for him last year. Te’o said they were from the person he believed to be Lennay Kekua, a woman he had fallen for online but never met face-to-face.

After the first message was played, Te’o said: “It sounds like a girl, doesn’t it?”

The interview was the All-American’s first on camera since his tale of inspired play after the deaths of his grandmother and girlfriend on the same day in September unraveled as a bizarre hoax in an exposé by the website Deadspin on Jan. 16.

Te’o’s parents appeared with him for part of the interview and backed up his claim that he wasn’t involved in the fabrication, saying they, too, had spoken on the phone with a person they believed to be Kekua.

Couric addressed speculation that the tale was concocted by Te’o as a way to cover up his sexual orientation. Asked if he were gay, Te’o said “no” with a laugh. “Far from it. Faaaar from that.”

He also said he was “scared” and “didn’t know what to do” after receiving a call on Dec. 6 — two days before the Heisman Trophy presentation — from a person who claimed to be his “dead” girlfriend.

“Part of me was saying, if you say that she is alive, what would everybody think?” Te’o said. “What are you going to tell everybody who follows you, who you’ve inspired? What are you going to say?”

Earlier in the interview, Te’o was asked about transcripts of interviews where he speaks about meeting Kekua — even though such a meeting never occurred.

“For people feeling they’re misled, that I’m sorry for,” Te’o said. “I wasn’t as forthcoming about it, but I didn’t lie. … Through embarrassment and fear of what people may think, that I was committed to this person I didn’t meet, that scared me. To avoid any further conversation, I wasn’t as forthcoming as I should have been.”

Couric suggested that the person behind the voicemails might have been Ronaiah Tuiasosopo, a 22-year-old man from California, whom Te’o said has apologized to him for pulling the hoax.

“Do you think that could have been a man on the other end of the phone?” she said.

“Well, it didn’t sound like a man,” Te’o said. “It sounded like a woman. If he somehow made that voice, that’s incredible. That’s an incredible talent to do that.”

Also yesterday, Diane O’Meara, the woman whose pictures were used in fake online accounts for Kekua, said Tuiasosopo confessed to her in a 45-minute phone conversation as the scheme unraveled.